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I say that because it's something not commonly done in Portuguese, and because Brazilian Portuguese was massively influenced by many Bantu stuff. It's a supposition, not an affirmation.

I had some time off, so I've translated the North Wind and The Sun Fable into it.

    The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.
    They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.
    Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him;
    and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.
    And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

I have an aim with my conlang's phonetics, so this is what I want it to sound.

    karzwes ɾezen un ∫amsen kʲuʒoɾnot kim emuɾzeɾ kʲase stʲe hejβiwi hejwatʲe juβiawe mu∫iɾa dalɦen haiː
    jusedxojntizɦeiˑn xwim kim sojtirpʰu ɦeiˑzmes dalɦen əlhuh, emuɾzeɾ kʲasepʰu
    hiːastʲe karzwes ɾezen ɦeiˑzmes emuɾzeɾ ɾojzi βun stʲe ɾojzizɦeiˑ un ɾojzizɦeiˑ hejβiwi dalɦes muɾlihiˑ joiβi un hiːastʲe karzwes ɾezen ɾaizes kisilsu
    hiːastʲe ∫amsen in∫iˑɾa xoijiˑna hiˑjustʲe iβiwien dalɦes əlhuh un karzwes ɾezen pʰojsti un xojntipʰukwe xwim ∫amsen emuɾzeɾ jukʲase

I've been using diacritics to indicate the sounds not covered by the latin script, here's how it turned out:

    Karzwes Rezen un Śamsen kyuźorḱnot kym emurzer kiase, stye heyiviwi hewatye yuviawe, muśyra dalhen hayy.
    Yusedḱointizheyn ḱwym kym soitirṗu heyzmes dalhen ụlhuh, emurzer kiaseṗu.
    Hyyastye Karzwes Rezen heyzmes ermurzer roizi, vun stye roizizhey un roizizhey, heiviwi dalhes murlyhy yoiyi. Un hyyastye Karzwes
    Rezen raizes kisilsu.
    Hyyastye Śamsen inśyra ḱoiyina, hyyustye iviwien dalhes ụlhuh; un Karzwes Rezen ṗoisti un ḱointiṗukwe ḱwym Śamsen emurzer yukiase.

This is me reading it, might be very far from intended IPA. This took a lot of time to make :lol:
 
Recently went looking into learning some Japanese.
They have three ****ing few-thousand character alphabets...used together...in almost all modern texts.
This is going to take a while...though their founding alphabet is based on Chinese characters, so seeing the differences shouldn't be as hard as actually learning mandarin was...right?
 
Huh, cool, I guess I must have gotten mixed up when reading up more languages to learn on wikipedia.

I am going to buy the CD from Rosetta...169 quid though...but the digits in the price convinced me :3
 
Eктωρ said:

Looks a bit like polish to me. Ever considered making a writing system to go with it? There are quite a few good websites on the subject - heck, there's even a wikibooks page: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Conlang/Beginner/Writing

HIrwP.png

Kobrag said:
Recently went looking into learning some Japanese.
They have three ****ing few-thousand character alphabets...used together...in almost all modern texts.
This is going to take a while...though their founding alphabet is based on Chinese characters, so seeing the differences shouldn't be as hard as actually learning mandarin was...right?

Besides Hiragana (the curly cute anime one) and Katakana (the angry sharp one) (both 48 characters and incredibly easy to learn), Kanji aren't that hard to memorise. My lecturer told me that, for some psychological reason, the really complicated ones are even easier to remember (I always remember this useless bastard
220px-Bi%C3%A1ng.svg.png
)

On top of that the full 3,000 range isn't always used in all contexts--especially not in speech, which is basically designed to avoid confusion. From my experience with Japanese, the vocabulary is miniscule, and almost every technical noun is written in Engrish (yes, engRish)
 
I have a writing system (three, in fact) for my other conlang, this one I want to do in latin script. It fits just fine, the diacritics are just an addition, but it can work without them. Yeah, I reckon it sounds a bit like Polish, but I like the way it sounds. It's grammatically closer to arabic and latin, though.
 
I really need to get back to working on my conlang. I remember giving up because I made all the words so long that they became impossible/impractical to pronounce. Like the word 'istemidatotonperanda' means 'history' though it really comes out as being 'the result of keeping record'.

I could maybe keep the long words with some slight adjustment and make that the 'high-class' form, and then a 'simplified' form that normal people speak, vaguely like Chinese.
 
Biggest words I've put so far in the conlang are "Yusedḱointizheyn" and "Zemsulykoisi", first is actually a compound word that mean "They agreed" and the second means "personhood".
 
Just cut the words up in a logical manner. The "spaces" in a lot of languages are kind of ambiguous (Turkish, Persian, Chinese and Japanese) so complex concepts can be transliterated as incredibly long words. The inverse of this is of course building complex words from a collection of simple but powerful concepts, which makes it incredibly easy to expand the language. Chinese is the extreme end of this.

The longest word I've got is Khoteikkeimateideimrukima-ghurgazermatshakk, which is more of a run-on sentence, but because particles can attach to words ad infinitum, there's no limit to word length. If i were to divide that up like a normal human being I'd end up with Khoti i Ikki i mati i deim rukima ghur gazer mat shakk (a capitalist society begun by members of a socially conservative society)
 
Eктωρ said:
A "Greek kiss" in Brazil refers to a ******, there's also a (now archaic) slang word for prostitute that is "Polaca", the feminine form of "Polish". :lol:

A thing I've been noticing more about Brazilian Portuguese is that we (probably from African influences) often repeat words to add emphasis, something I don't think Portuguese people do.

For example, if someone says something that you understand but disagree with, you could say, "Sim, eu entendo, mas..." "Yes, I understand, but...", what we usually do, though, is to say is "Sim sim, mas..." "Yes yes, but...".At first it seems like something you could also do with English "Yes, yes indeed", but we really tend repeat words like that.

"I'm not really well", "Eu não estou bem mesmo" is most often said "Eu não estou bem, bem" "I'm not well, well", with the second one receiving tonal difference to emphasize. You could also say "You don't really do that, do you? "Você não faz isso mesmo, não é?", but we say "Você não faz isso não, faz?" "You don't do that no, do?" which would be answered with "Sim, faço sim" or "Não, não faço não" "Yes, I do, yes"; "No, I don't do, no". Heck, most Brazilians use the imperative like that, "Não faça/faz isso não" "Don't do that no" instead of "Não faça/faz isso" "Don't do that", "Faz isso sim pra tu ver" "Do that yes so you'll see" instead of "Faz isso mesmo pra tu ver" "Do just that so you'll see"

I could stay here just thinking more examples.
That's also dialectal. Some of the examples you showed aren't that common down here.
 
jacobhinds said:

Zemsulykoisi can't be divided, really, because it literally means "Me-isness" Z-M is the pronoun root, so "zem" is "me", the -su- interfix is used to join two roots into a single concept, creating a third meaning, K-S is the root for "is", for example, it derives the words "koisi", "kiase", "kisi" and "lykoisi", which mean "is", "to be", "to do" and "to exist" approximately.

Ly- is also a preffix to modificate a word in that way, for example "I want you close to me" would be either "Zemenye lyhy liase" or "Zemye lyhy liasezme". "Hy" means "this", and "Ly-Hy" is "close". So all these joined together would mean, literally, something akin to "existance of me-ness" "me-existance". It's both "personhood" and "consciousness". More correctly I could say "Zemenye murlyhy liase", "I want you closer to me".

Yusedḱointizheyn can be broken down as Yu-sedḱointi-zheyn; this goes into the way verbs are formed in this language, which is completely irregular, for example, "sedḱointi" means "to agree", but you could also say "sedḱiante". In fact here it's probably better I change it. "Yusedḱiante" means "agreed", it's a simple, completed, past action. The most correct way to say "They agreed" would be "Heynzmen yusedḱiante", but you can also conjugate the word, which the neutral gender, plural third person form is -zheyn, so "Yusedḱiantezheyn".

My mix up with koisi and kiase here comes from a simple mistake. Take "zhatol", "beauty", to say "This is beautiful" I could say either "Hymuzhtol kiase" or "hyzhoitli". To say, for example, "the beauty of a woman" you'd say "Temnis lyzhtoili", you see? "The beauty of a woman is greater than the heat of the Sun", "Temnis lyzhtoili kym śamses śyra murzarg kiase". "Śyra" is not written "śoiyri" because it comes from another derivation, it's derived from Ś-Y, fire, and the -ra suffix that turns it into "heat".
 
Oh **** off you retarded snowflake. That's not what I meant, but whatever, spam and ruin one of the best threads this forum has with unrelated bull**** if it makes you happy.
 
Probably because this thread is for real languages and questions/interesting facts about the nuances and subtleties of such. Not conlangs, no matter how well designed they are, aren't applicable for communicating with foreign people.

Honestly, it'd get better response in a thread over in the arts bit rather than getting pissy at people getting pissy about it here
 
It's not like, what, a page of posts is going to hopelessly derail a thread, for ****s sake, people. If anything, this completely pointless discussion has done worse for the thread than my posts could ever have done.
 
I kind of agree with wellen despite taking part in it, I saw it as ever so slightly out of place. But then again, it's more related to the topic at hand than 90% of the other page-long thread derailments that happen all over the place, so its pretty much harmless. No need to go outta whack. Getting mad about the conlang thing has already derailed the thread more than the actual conlang discussion.

edit: i mad thred
 
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